Well for those of you lucky enough to live close to Munster Indiana, you probably have a golden ticket if you knew about the upcoming Dark Lord Day (today).
Since I live all the way over in Arizona I decided I would brew a Dark Lord inspired Russian Imperial Stout. The past two weeks I've been researching, speculating and tossing around recipes until I came up with the following one that I like.

I have a nice new 5L flask that I did a big starter for the 9037 imperial blend that is supposedly good to 15-16%. If it poops out before I'm happy with it I'll follow it up with a decanted 5L starter of WLP099, but I have faith in this yeast! I smacked the activator pack about an hour at fridge temperature before I put it in the starter and it was so swollen I thought it was going to pop.

The starter went on the stirplate at about 10pm Friday night, should give me about 22 hours of growth.

I'll be aerating the hell out of this wort. Hopefully it will get me to the finish line.

Anyone know how much (weight wise) is in a 12oz jar of molasses? I got 2x 12oz just in case, but the whole thing weighs in at 1.8lbs. Its a glass jar so I figure it weighs about half a pound, but any advice would be appreciated.

Thats what I ended up doing, measured the weight of the jar full and then empty. One 12oz jar of "Grandma's non-sulphited molasses' is about 1.25lbs.

I'll put up pictures tomorrow/tonight.

So I guess I had my burner set too low, I ended up with 5.8g post boil and I didn't have anymore time to continue to boil. However, when corrected with this volume increase I hit my numbers for 78% eff. 1.133 OG, so somewhere in the 13.8% - 13.9% ABV range all said and done. I guess the Dark Lord exerted some influence on my beer and wanted it to stay true to the recipe. So I did what I usually do with the extra wort, I fed about .3g of this monster to my 6 month old sour.

I'll update this with fermenting info, its pouring into the conical right now.

Ahh, I think I see what happened. I forgot to include the volume amount 48oz of honey and 12oz of molasses would add. Thats about 60oz, which is about how much I was over. Noted for next time.

I thought about putting them in the secondary, but didn't want to risk an infection so into the boil they went to get sanitized and into solution as much as possible. I gave this guy a big 5L starter of the wyeast imperial yeast and this thing is ferocious.

Now for some pictures as promised.

The yeast starter and some sacrifices to the Dark Lord. Those bears are virgins, the Dark Lord will be pleased.

Fermentation is going very strong. The high amounts of flaked stuff I used ended up creating a LOT of proteins for this beer which I think is offsetting the fermcap addition in the fermenter as I'm STILL getting krauzen buildup! I added a few more drops and it died down a tiny bit, but not like the other beers where there is zero krauzen buildup.

Beersmith estimates 1.028 if I get 80% attenuation with this yeast. If this brew is a hit maybe I'll do it again later this year and take into account the volume addition for molasses and honey and get my OG right on and do it Mephistopheles style